“You should expect everything. Not necessarily from the
government,” Assad told CBS in an interview conducted in the
presidential palace in Damascus. He went on to say that it is
“not only the government” in the region. “You have
different parties, you have different factions, you have
different ideology.”

Asked if he would mount a military response to any attack on
Syria, Assad said “I am not fortune teller to tell you what's
going to happen.”

The US will “pay the price if you are not wise with dealing
with terrorists,” the Syrian president told ‘CBS This
Morning’ co-host Charlie Rose in his first interview with
American television in nearly two years.

This comes as American President Barack Obama is seeking to win
an authorization from US Congress – that has been rather
skeptical so far - for a ‘limited’ military strike against the
Syrian government. The administration accused the Syrian
government of ordering the use of chemical weapons in a Damascus
suburb last month.

Assad, however, denied any involvement in the alleged attack.

“There is no evidence that I used chemical weapons against my
own people,” he said.

According to Assad, the government forces were not in the area of
the chemical weapons attack on August 21.

“Our soldiers in another area were attacked chemically,”
he said. “They went to the hospital as casualties because of
chemical weapons. But in the area where they said the government
used chemical weapons we only had video and we only have pictures
and allegations.”

Assad stressed that there were no government forces in the area
of the alleged chemical attack.

“Our forces, our police, our institutions don’t exist there.
How can you talk about what happened if you don’t have
evidence?”

US Secretary of State John Kerry, a forceful proponent of a
military action against Syria, argued on Monday that Assad's
repeated denials were “contradicted by facts.” He described the
Syrian president as “a man without credibility.”

“We know that his regime gave orders to prepare for a chemical
attack,” Kerry told reporters in London, on the final leg of
his trip to Europe in a bid to bolster EU support for a military
strike. “We know by tracing it physically where the rockets
came from and where they landed,” he added.

Washington has referred to its intelligence and military
communications as proof that the Assad government was behind the
August attack in the Damascus suburbs. It also says it
intercepted conversations involving Syrian officials during which
they took responsibility for the attack. However, the
administration has so far refused to make that evidence public.

In Assad’s view, the explanation behind this is that they do not
have any evidence. He also said the current situation
reminds him of the arguments that the then-President George W.
Bush's administration used before launching an intervention
against Iraq. He recalled “the precedent” with Secretary of State
Colin Powell over a decade ago, when he presented to the United
Nations what the US claimed to be evidence of Saddam Hussein
possessing weapons of mass destruction.